Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I take a look at a new partnership between SAP and AWS and examine what it means for Oracle.
Highlights
00:23 — Oracle’s rivals, SAP and AWS, are teaming up to try to enhance a cloud-native database from SAP. This combination clearly is intended to see if they can take away some database business from Oracle. It involves the HANA Cloud database.
01:08 — When HANA was developed at SAP, it was conceived as a database. The S/4HANA Cloud ERP offering has overshadowed the notion of HANA as a database. As so many of SAP’s customers move into the world of data, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital business, CEO Christian Klein sees an opportunity to enter the market with HANA Cloud database.
02:06 — I have not heard Christian Klein in the last three years mention this HANA Cloud database on a quarterly earnings call. On the call last week, he talked about this in the context of SAP’s platform business, the Business Technology Platform. Perhaps as SAP puts more emphasis on that, it sees this bigger opportunity to offer its own cloud-native database.
02:50 — Klein was saying that the HANA Cloud database allows customers to have enormous scale-out capabilities but that SAP’s constantly trying to innovate and improve it. So he said, it is innovating with AWS on its ARM chips, to see if it can boost the performance and cut the cost for the HANA Cloud database.
03:39 — I think this is indicative of a couple of things on the outside in the world of customers. Again, as I said, there’s so much more demand, so we’re seeing lots of potential, lots of opportunity here for these sorts of tools.
04:04 — On the Cloud Wars Top 10 vendor side, if it is true that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” then it makes a lot of sense here for SAP and AWS to see if they can jointly create a database that could go after some of Oracle’s big business there.
